The mysterious case of Richard Windsor

All is not as it appears in the case of Richard Windsor, the alias used by outgoing EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, apparently to shield email messages from discovery and disclosure. Under court order to cough up the email messages to Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and having turned over a first installment of 2,100 such email messages earlier this week, the Obama administration is making this a case that might test the ingenuity of Sherlock Holmes.

With Horner’s assistance, my daughter Eliana tries to pierce the fog of administrative war in her NRO column “Lisa Jackson’s gadfly.” Let’s get to work on this case:

Monday, the administration responded to Horner’s Freedom of Information Act request, and he received 2,100 of some 12,000 e-mails sent from Jackson’s alias account, with the rest set to arrive in installments of approximately 3,000 a month over the next three months.

But, having pored over the items, Horner thinks something’s fishy. “The e-mails they released do not resemble the ‘Windsor’ e-mails we have,” Horner says. That address, according to Horner, was known to and used among high-level EPA officials and Jackson’s political confidants, including the man likely to replace her on the job, Bob Perciasepe, whereas the e-mails the EPA sent to the CEI on Monday appear to have come from an account used for more general purposes, such as sending agency-wide e-mail blasts.

While the EPA has acknowledged the existence of Jackson’s Windsor account, it makes a contention that doesn’t comport with the facts as we know them: that is, that Jackson has only two government e-mail accounts. According to the EPA, Jackson holds only a public account, whose address is posted on the EPA’s website and which hundreds of thousands of people use to contact her, and an internal account, which she uses to correspond with staff and other government officials.

Horner suspects that, despite what the EPA says, Jackson actually has more than one internal account: at least one used to correspond with agency employees at large — the one from which the EPA turned over the documents on Monday — and the Windsor account, used for more sensitive subjects.

Horner believes that, in protecting the Windsor e-mails, the administration is trying to hide its musings on cap-and-trade, a legislative proposal that never gained broad political support. Acknowledging the legislation’s failure, President Obama was not deterred. “Cap-and-trade was just one way of skinning the cat,” he said. “It wasn’t the only way. It was a means, not an end. And I’m going to be looking for other means to address this problem.”

It’s those means, and other sensitive aspects of the administration’s environmental agenda, that Horner thinks may be hiding in Jackson’s Windsor inbox. A lawyer by training, Horner is an outspoken climate-change skeptic and the author of many books on the subject, and he suspects the EPA is continuing to shield the Windsor correspondence from public view because its contents would be damaging to the administration. “At the most basic level,” he says, “we know they’re hiding correspondence that Jackson and her team felt would be sufficiently troubling to the public or problematic to the agenda if revealed that it was worth creating a false identity to protect it.”

There is more at the link warranting your attention. It’s all hands on deck to get to keep this case in view and get to work on it.

JOHN adds: 3,000 emails a month for three months? Ridiculous! In my cases, the parties typically exchange hundreds of thousands of emails, sometimes millions, amounting to millions of pages. This is the norm, not the exception. The idea that the Obama administration can only come up with 3,000 emails a month is absurd. This is a delaying tactic, nothing more. In the world of real litigation, no one would stand for it.